Zune Marketplace, RIP

But can you still download for offline playback with groove music pass because that's what i used. Someone needs to find a way to still sync with zune!

Yes, absolutely. You can buy music directly through the "Microsoft Store," or through the Groove player. It used to be that you had to do it on a Windows 8.1 or higher PC or a Windows Phone, but I think you can do it through the regular Groove website or even the Microsoft Store itself. I think the option is labeled something like "keep for offline payback." You're essentially just directly buying the mp3's. But I suppose you do get the advantage that if you have a Windows Phone, it's automatically going to sync up, and you won't have to reconstruct playlists you may already be using. Otherwise, it's no different than buying mp3's through Amazon or eMusic or Google Music, or... dare I say it... m4a's through iTunes. I only use that last option if a piece of music is literally available nowhere else, because, interestingly, even Apple fanboys will typically admit now that the iTunes software is a bloated piece of garbage. The nice thing about Amazon, eMusic, Google Music, and yes, the Microsoft Store, is that you don't have use to a buggy, bloated piece of software to download your purchase.

this is really lame... I've used zunes forever and now I won't be able to sync new music? Does the groove software offer to download for offline playback or to sync to windows phone?

Paul,

That sounds very crafty of you. I remember when the end of the Zune Social was announced, and the software modified to kill it. There were still some backdoors to the Zune Social that you could still use for months to see your playlists, keep up with friends, that kind of thing. Gradually, it looked like the playcounts weren't being tabulated, and finally, those backdoors were either plugged or the Zune Social architecture on their servers was just killed off.

In this instance, I have a speculation. It's possible that whatever server architecture supplies the Marketplace has been simply turned off. That would mean that the software simply has nothing to connect to. As one piece of evidence, I've noticed that the Zune Social Tagger, which I sometimes still use to get metadata and such right on new mp3's I've purchased from eMusic or ripped from CD's, is now giving me a message saying that the Zune Marketplace isn't available in my region (which it identifies as "en-US.") So it's very likely that the software's Marketplace component is tied to the existence of the Marketplace. And it may be written into the internal code that if a certain signal is received (or not received), that component of the software simply goes dormant. FWIW, I don't think the Zune Marketplace was ever available in China, and yet I was still able to use it there both in 2008 and in 2013-15. I suspect it's because my login ID was identified as American.

Well, so far, and my existing Zune Pass content is still playing. Aside from not being able to download anything new, the only other change is that if I haven't already synced it to my device, it won't do so now. Anything already on my Zune is fine. So I'm just limited to what I happened to grab before the shut down. It is odd... Normally, with technology, services improve and expand functionality. In this instance, it feels like Microsoft is moving backwards by gradually killing off Zune services. I know it's because they want to nudge everyone onto the Groove platform, but Jesus, streaming doesn't work for a good number of us. If it did, we would have switched on our own ages ago. There are good reasons we've stuck with this as long as we have.

Still, I'm not angry. Annoyed, yes, definitely. Disappointed, sure. All I can figure is, Microsoft must have run into a hard financial reality here. If it were profitable to keep the Zune Marketplace going, there's no reason for them to have not done so. But with no new customers, and their existing ZM customer base shrinking as people move on to other platforms, I have to imagine that the costs of keeping ZM going must have gradually outpaced whatever money they were making off it. It may have also had to do with licensing from the record companies, too, since that also isn't cheap. I'm also looking at the glass half full - I think we heard of Zune being killed off as early as what, 2010? 2011? Here it is, 2016, and it's only now that this last vestige of their support for the platform was finally terminated. I think my first Zune device was purchased in 2006 or 2007. These days, that's a pretty respectable lifespan for any software or technology.

I too am very unhappy with this. I went in and canceled my music pass because it's just not able to do the same thing as the Zune software and Marketplace. I liked it much better when we could download the files to our computers. I hate the new Groove Music!